Diplomacy with Iran may be step too far for
Bush

WORLDVIEW: Knowledge deters. Iran's
leaders are rational actors. Diplomacy works. These three
propositions summarise the emerging realist paradigm which this
week dramatically displaced the bellicose one at the heart of US
policy towards Iran.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published on Monday
concluded with high confidence that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons
programme in 2003 under international pressure.

Its continuing uranium enrichment programme is for energy not
weapons. But since the two are intimately related, Iran has the
knowledge to make a nuclear weapon if it wants to. Since that fact
cannot be reversed it should be given security and other incentives
not to do so.

"In our judgment," say the authors of the NIE, "only an Iranian
political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would
plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons." Its
assessment that Iran halted the programme in 2003 primarily in
response to international pressure "indicates Tehran's decisions
are judged by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a
weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military
costs". Hence the main message of the report is that diplomacy can
work to convince them that such a political decision is rationally
in their interests.

It has been a great week for those who follow the arguments in
Washington between administration hardliners, their neoconservative
allies and their realist and radical critics. The battle has been
fought out in policy briefings, newspaper and online columns, blogs
and television channels.

The word "startling" cropped up repeatedly to describe the
report's impact. It completely reversed the previous intelligence
assessment made in 2005 which concluded with high confidence that
Iran has indeed an active nuclear weapons programme. That has been
the linchpin of the Bush administration's policy of containment and
pre-emptive action against Tehran, coupled lately with an active
pursuit of tougher sanctions testing its willingness to comply.
Conversations among these protagonists invariably hinged on whether
and when US president George Bush would launch an air attack on
Iranian nuclear targets - probably in April or May in the middle of
the presidential campaign.

That prospect looked completely off the table by the end of the
week, according to most commentators. Even if the administration
does not change its policy it will be unable to draw Europeans
along with it. Some of them pointed out that, in his warning about
avoiding a third world war in October, Bush referred not to nuclear
weapons but preventing Iran having the knowledge to make them. That
implies an even more rigorously interventionist approach.

In his arguments with US policy, Mohamed ElBaradei of the
International Atomic Energy Agency has consistently said it is
impossible to reverse such an intellectual breakthrough once it is
made because this would endow Iran with a "virtual" weapon which
they would need to be rationally persuaded not to make real. His
argument comes much more into the foreground this week.

Journalist Seymour Hersh told CNN the new information on which
the NIE report is based has been available in whole or in part for
up to a year but that publication, requested by Congress, has been
sat on for months by US vice-president Dick Cheney's office. In the
meantime the focus of their rhetoric shifted from weapons to
Iranian subversion of US policy in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza -
providing another possible casus belli. He believes it will not be
possible for the war party to retrieve its momentum.

Others suggested that if the report represents information from
a specific Iranian source who defected earlier this year, then it
could be capped by an equally dramatic intelligence coup later
contradicting it - perhaps of Israeli origin - which would put the
war scenario back on track.

There the estimate was greeted with dismay and disbelief -
unsurprisingly given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
belligerent anti-Zionism. This week he said the NIE report was a
"declaration of victory" for Iran. But if it is to be believed, he
is a marginal figure in Iran's power structure, strengthened only
by the stimulus from US fundamentalism. Real decisions are taken by
supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his circle, who are far from
the mad Islamofascist mullahs of neoconservative imaginings.

Confronted with this evidence and in a compromise between
administration pre-emptors and realists, the White House has in the
past few months constructed a strategic plan to contain rather than
engage Iran. It sought to recruit conservative Sunni Arab states
like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt against assumed Iranian Shia
subversion in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. This was coupled with an
effort to renew Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, culminating in
the Annapolis summit last month.

The writer on Iran, Dilip Hiro, points out that Iran's behaviour
does not fit this sectarian mould. Their support for the Sunni
Hamas movement belies it, while they have already consolidated
their regional interest in Iraq and have popular support throughout
the Middle East because of their politics, notwithstanding their
non-Arab, Shia identity.

Hence, he says, the NIE conclusion bears further exploration:
"Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny
and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its
security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways,
might - if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible - prompt Tehran
to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons programme."

No less a neocon luminary than Robert Kagan agrees. In his
monthly Washington Post column this week, he calls for a
comprehensive effort to engage Iran diplomatically. "With its
policy tools broken, the Bush administration can sit around
isolated for the next year. Or it can seize the initiative, and do
the next administration a favour, by opening direct talks with
Tehran."

That would reverse its existing policy, but give it a genuine
advantage with regional and European allies. It would also feed
constructively into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, assuming
Iran could be encouraged to engage in them.

It is probably a step too far for Bush. In that case it is
difficult to disagree with Hiro's conclusion that "increasingly,
Washington under Bush will be the loser, no matter who prevails in
the region - an apt definition of a superpower in decline and of a
genuine zero-sum fiasco" arising from its misconceived invasion of
Iraq and confrontation with Iran.